The author talks quite frankly about his own life: not as biography, but as an example of the kind of thing that can happen. For instance, if you have a profound enlightenment experience, can you then be pulled back into normal consciousness, or is the experience permanent? Adyashanti's common-sense answer: either can happen. Sometimes you have a temporary experience, and sometimes a permanent shift. OK, I can buy that. Because he is not speaking from theory, but from the experiences of himself, his teachers, and his students. He talks about riding a bicycle and he talks about falling in love, but always with an obvious relevance to the universal pitfalls on the path.

I also like his absolute insistence that the goal of the spiritual path is not to feel blissful or happy, but to find the truth.

Here are a couple of quotes that I think serve as good examples of his style and message.

We have to be willing to lose our whole world. That may sound romantic when you first hear it—"Oh, yes, let me sign up! I'm willing to lose my whole world." But when your whole world starts to crumble, and you start to emerge from unimaginably deep states of denial, it is something altogether different.

We may think, "so-and-so shouldn't have said that to me." But the reality is that they did. As soon as the mind says something shouldn't have happened, we are in an argument with reality. Reality is simply what it is. As soon as we have anything in us that judges it, that condemns it, that says it shouldn't be, we will feel division. There isn't a justified reason to argue with reality, because we'll never win the fight. Arguing with reality is a perfect prescription for suffering. (*Italics in original.)